Parents will be prosecuted

This is a discussion on Parents will be prosecuted within the The Second Amendment & Gun Legislation Discussion forums, part of the Related Topics category; Originally Posted by Ron
So, I guess my point is that we need to lead the charge to try to get gun owners to exercise ...

So, I guess my point is that we need to lead the charge to try to get gun owners to exercise greater care, lock up their guns if not on their hip or in their pocket, because like it or not folks, if we don't do it, you can bet the farm that under the current administration, it is going to be done for us.

Too late. It's already been done to us, and it didn't have anything to do with what gun owners did. It had to do only with what anti-gun rights activists did. They took away our rights, as usual.

This was passed 7 to 0, from the public safety committee. This is the same committee that considered the CHL bill that session. So, looks like what we had here was purely a concession to the anti-gun lobby to gain passage of the CHL bill.

Well not quite. We still have the right to own and, I believe in most states, to carry a gun.

We have the right to own in Texas, but not to have them readily available for self defense. That's a pretty important part of the right to own. We've already lost that in Texas. We lost the right to carry in 1871, only gaining back a fraction of our rights with heavily regulated CHL in 1995. To get that, we lost the right to have firearms readily available for self defense in our homes without fear of prosecution.

I am suggesting that each time a child is killed because a gun owner was careless, gives them more of an argument to ban guns.

The story we're talking about here is a 12 year old shooting and killing his friend with a shotgun. Just because a child was killed, doesn't mean the gun owner was careless.

It is not, IMO, an answer to say too late. If that is the general attitude of gun owners, then, indeed, it is too late.

You said:

So, I guess my point is that we need to lead the charge to try to get gun owners to exercise greater care, lock up their guns if not on their hip or in their pocket, because like it or not folks, if we don't do it, you can bet the farm that under the current administration, it is going to be done for us.

So, gun owners should lock up their guns and render them inoperable in order to keep the anti-gun crowd from doing it? I think what gun owners ought to do is to stop advocating and supporting the anti-gun rights position.

I am suggesting that each time a child is killed because a gun owner was careless, gives them more of an argument to ban guns.

If you read the legislative history of this law I just posted, I think you can see that losing this right in Texas had nothing to do with what gun owners did. You can see that a principal driver behind the law was the fact that pre-existing child negligence laws only covered children up to fourteen. This law was intended to hold parents accountable for what fifteen and sixteen year old "children" did.

It's not that regular law abiding gun owners are doing that brought about the law. It's what 15 and 16 year old criminals have been doing. They're illegally taking firearms out of the home and killing each other over drugs and gang activity. That's where all these "accidental" shootings come from that the anti-gun rights supporters were talking about.

Like I said, law abiding citizens didn't do anything to justify having this law passed against them. We weren't careless and irresponsible in handling our firearms to the outrage of society. All we did was ask the legislature to stop infringing our right under the Texas constitution and to respect our right to keep and bear arms in public.

The only time a loaded firearm should be accessible to a child is on the range, when that child (of an appropriate age, say 9 or 10 or so) is being taught to shoot safely by a responsioble adult.
Any other time a child can get his or her hands on a loaded weapon, without strict parental supervision, it's the parents' fault, and the parents would most certainly be certifiably stupid and/or insane to ever let such a thing happen.

The only time a loaded firearm should be accessible to a child is on the range, when that child (of an appropriate age, say 9 or 10 or so) is being taught to shoot safely by a responsioble adult.
Any other time a child can get his or her hands on a loaded weapon, without strict parental supervision, it's the parents' fault, and the parents would most certainly be certifiably stupid and/or insane to ever let such a thing happen.

So, you would have supported the anti-gun rights lobby in passing this bill in Texas in 1995 , see here.

The only time a loaded firearm should be accessible to a child is on the range, when that child (of an appropriate age, say 9 or 10 or so) is being taught to shoot safely by a responsioble adult.
Any other time a child can get his or her hands on a loaded weapon, without strict parental supervision, it's the parents' fault, and the parents would most certainly be certifiably stupid and/or insane to ever let such a thing happen.

The only time a loaded firearm should be accessible to a child is on the range, when that child (of an appropriate age, say 9 or 10 or so) is being taught to shoot safely by a responsioble adult.
Any other time a child can get his or her hands on a loaded weapon, without strict parental supervision, it's the parents' fault ...

And, if the child were competent, responsible and trained about the safety, handling and effective use of a firearm?

Plenty of young'uns have used firearms to defend their homes and family, when the older folks were not there. Now and again, even in this day and age, you see a story in the news from time to time, about exactly that. It all depends on the training and competency. Which is why I think so many lament the days when firearms were a part of our lives as a society, just one of the many tools everyone learned how to use. Why? Because they can be bloody useful, even to a 9yr old, so long as that person isn't a modern-day twit with a spoiled upbringing and not clue one about guns beyond the silver screen's terrible facsimile.

The only time a loaded firearm should be accessible to a child is on the range

I don't know if you saw my posts from yesterday, but pretty much all of them fightin' words were in this Texas law when it was passed in 1995. It looks like some of our "supporters" thought that was the price we had to pay to ask the legislature to stop infringing our right to possess in public.

It was a pretty big price to pay to get only some of our public possession right back. We let the state government infringe on our right to firearm possession within the sanctity of our own home. If you want to avoid any potential prosecution, and you have children under 17, you have to come very close to submitting to a DC style ban on all firearms in your home. We're minus the onerous registration for possession, but what good is an unloaded or inoperable gun? Who is going to keep a loaded gun like a shotgun on their person 24X7?

Where did they get the authority to pass such a law? What part of any of this had to do with the wearing of firearms?